Shaq Uncut: My Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

dunk, hit fadeaways, dribble. He was an upperclassman and he used to laugh at me. He’d do simple stuff like throw me anupfake, wait for me to jump, then go around me like I wasn’t even there. That guy abused me.
    The coach of the team never even acknowledged me. He never looked at me, never bothered to learn my name. I don’t blame him, I guess. I was terrible. My knees were really bad at that time, and I had one of those brown knee braces with the hole in it on one knee and metal braces on the other because ofmy Osgood-Schlatter disease. I couldn’t do anything. It hurt too much.
    Here’s the other problem: I was lazy. I liked to do it my way and I didn’t use my size. I just didn’t know how to play mean. I was going at half speed and everyone else was going a hundred miles an hour.
    They had a junior varsity team, but I was too embarrassed to be on it. I came home and told my dad I got cut and I thoughthe’d be really mad, but he said, “Go back up to the gym and keep working.”
    I was crushed that I didn’t make that team. I pretended it was no big deal, but it was. I didn’t cry, but I was devastated. I went into my room, looked at the ceiling, and said, “I’m never going to make it.” I was really down on myself.
    After a while I tried to put my own positive spin on it. I’m telling myself,
MaybeI’ll be a deejay, maybe I’ll be a rapper
. But those were long shots. I knew that.
    Almost all of my friends made the team, which made it worse. I laughed it off, made a joke about the coach. I was still a funny guy, a great dancer. I was still JC—Just Cool.
    My father wouldn’t let me quit. He had me play on the base with the enlisted soldiers. He threw me in there with these military guys whowere grown men. They banged me and knocked me down and messed me up. If nothing else, I was going to be tough.
    I wrote to Coach Brown to tell him about getting cut. He sent me back a nice letter about how I should keep trying, keep working.
    Shortly afterwards, this guy named Ford McMurtry, who was the assistant coach of the high school team, quit that job and started a team on the base. He saidto me, “Come play for us.”
    Ford was nice to me. He raised my confidence level. He worked on my conditioning and my footwork. When I got discouraged with my clumsiness, he was patient. “Try it again, Shaquille,” he said without ever raising his voice. We got lucky because my friend Mitch Riles didn’t play on the high school team, either, because of bad grades, so the two of us were together again,Magic and Larry.
    My sophomore year I didn’t even bother to try out for the high school team. By then Coach McMurtry had put together such a good team we could have beaten Dwayne Clark and those other guys. He was determined to make me a player.
    I got some help from another guy who worked on the base. His name was Pete Popovich. He was watching me in the gym one day and he said, “Why aren’t youdunking the ball?” I told him, “I can’t jump. It’s my knees, I think. I just can’t get off the ground.”
    Later on, when I went upstairs to lift some weights, Pete said to me, “I can help you with your vertical leap.” He showed me how to do calf raises and told me do them every day. I did those damn things until my legs felt like they were going to fall off. From the end of my freshman year tothe end of my sophomore year in high school, my vertical leap went from eighteen inches to forty-two inches.
    In 1987 my father was transferred again, so we moved back to the United States. I was fifteen years old and halfway through mysophomore season in high school with Coach McMurtry, and I just hated to leave. I thought I was finally getting somewhere with the basketball.
    We stayed in NewJersey for a few weeks visiting family before we reported to our new base, Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. My uncle Mike Parris came by. He hadn’t seen me for a couple of years. He took me to a park down in South Orange, New